Staci Newmahr, Ph.D.

Ph.D., Stony Brook University, 2007

Gender, Risk, Feminist Epistemologies, Transgression, Emotion, Symbolic Interaction

Staci Newmahr is an ethnographer with a background in sociology and anthropology. She is interested in phenomenologies and narratives of limit (“edge”) experience. She has studied a wide range of activities and spaces, including sadomasochism (BDSM), Renaissance Faire devotees, feederism and asexuality. She has published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Symbolic Interaction, Qualitative Sociology and Qualitative Sociology Review.

Her book, Playing on the Edge (2011), an ethnography of a public BDSM community, illustrates that feelings of intimacy are the outcome of collaborative or co-present boundary transgression. This work led her to a broader interest in transgressive leisure practices, transcendent experiences and geek culture.

As a symbolic interactionist, Dr. Newmahr is primarily concerned with systems of meaning and meaning-making processes. Her work has re-conceptualized edgework from a feminist perspective by extending consideration to emotional risk-taking, and framed Renaissance Faires as erotic spaces. She is the co-editor of Selves, Symbols and Sexualities, an anthology of original, contemporary work theorizing sexuality from an interactionist perspective. She has also written on ethnographic methods; her interests in this area include field practices, inductive analysis and issues of subjectivity in ethnography. As part of a larger conversation about challenges to ethnography in the current academic climate, she co-conceived and co-proposed “surrogate ethnography.”  She is currently thinking and writing about Hi Li intersections of class, gender and race, phenomenology of transcendent experience, and radical pedagogy.  

Dr. Newmahr earned her PhD at Stony Brook University (New York) in 2007. An Institute of Advanced Study fellow (2019, Durham University) and keynote speaker in the U.S. and internationally, she has served as Associate Editor of Symbolic Interaction and as President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in 2020. She is a recipient of Buffalo State's Presidential Award for the Promotion of Equity and Diversity.

What I'm Reading and Teaching Right Now

CURRENTLY READING

Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity - Noel Ignatiev

How the Irish Became White - Noel Ignatiev

The Sum of Us - Heather McGhee

Dying of Whiteness - Jonathan Metzl

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life - Richard Hofstadter

Cruel Optimism - Lauren Berlant

Whose Science? Whose Knowledge - Sandra Harding

RECENTLY/CURRENTLY TEACHING

Sensuous Knowledge - Minna Salami

Sister Outsider - Audre Lorde

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality - Jane Ward 

Racism without Racists - Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Patriarchy Blues - Frederick Joseph

The Dialectic of Sex - Shulamith Firestone

Ejaculate Responsibly - Gabrielle Stanley Blair

Spare the Kids - Stacey Patton